I strongly disagree, I think LessWrong has become a much more vibrant and active place since Inkhaven started. Recently the frontpage has felt more… I can’t think of a better word than “corporate”… than I’d like. Maybe what I mean is that the LessWrong posters have started catering more and more toward the lowest-common-LessWrong-denominator.
For example, here are the top posts from September 2025 (I think October had a reasonable amount of Inkhaven spirit, considering all the people doing Halfhaven)
Tomas is always nice and refreshing, but imo the rest of this is just really extremely uninteresting and uninspired (no offense to anyone involved, each post is on its own good I think, but collectively they’re not that interesting), and seem very much catering to the lowest-common-LessWrong-denominator.
Contrast this selection with the following
I have not read as many of these (because there were more overall posts and these are more recent), but collectively the range of topics is so much more interesting & broad, you still get some lowest-common-denominator catering, but collectively these posts are so much more inspired than they were just two months ago.
I really would very much enjoy a world where each person participating in Inkhaven continued posting every day even after Inkhaven.
Edit: I would also say that concretely this has changed how I use the website a whole bunch too. In September I think most of the interesting parts of LessWrong discussion was happening inside shortforms, but now I think most of the interesting discussion has moved to posts again, which I consider very healthy.
Of the 16 November posts you cite as evidence of Inkhaven’s positive impact, I count three (Mikhail Samin, mingyuan, Ben Goldhaber) that were actually authored by an Inkhaven resident, and one of those three was a post that received a lot of criticism for its perceived low quality. (Another two were authored by habryka and Ben Pace, and another one was authored by johnswentworth who I think tried to post daily in the spirit of the thing, while not actually participating.) I think this is pretty weak evidence that Inkhaven has made LessWrong much more vibrant.
This is just false. Of the above list, the people who were doing Inkhaven in some form or another:
Me (2nd post on that list)
aggliu
RobertM
Mikhail
Mingyuan
Ben Goldhaber
Ben Pace
John Wentworth
Almost 50% of the whole list!
Me, Ben and Robert were just participating in Inkhaven (Ben for ~3 weeks, me and Robert for a week each) and Wentworth was doing his daily posting because of Inkhaven. It’s obvious there is a huge effect here (you can of course dispute that the posts are good, but trying to somehow slice it up as Inkhaven not having a huge effect seems very unlikely to have any good case for it).
It wasn’t clear to me from the Inkhaven website that you, Ben Pace, and John Wentworth were participating to that degree (though I did mention you three), and I missed aggliu and RobertM. So fair enough, I’ll retract my comment. (ETA: I missed aggliu since I didn’t know their name and they had only that one LW post in November, and I thought RobertM might be Rob Miles, but none of RobertM’s November LW posts seem to be listed among Rob Miles’s posts on the Inkhaven website. But obviously you were there and I was not so I defer to you.)
I strongly disagree, I think LessWrong has become a much more vibrant and active place since Inkhaven started. Recently the frontpage has felt more… I can’t think of a better word than “corporate”… than I’d like. Maybe what I mean is that the LessWrong posters have started catering more and more toward the lowest-common-LessWrong-denominator.
For example, here are the top posts from September 2025 (I think October had a reasonable amount of Inkhaven spirit, considering all the people doing Halfhaven)
Tomas is always nice and refreshing, but imo the rest of this is just really extremely uninteresting and uninspired (no offense to anyone involved, each post is on its own good I think, but collectively they’re not that interesting), and seem very much catering to the lowest-common-LessWrong-denominator.
Contrast this selection with the following
I have not read as many of these (because there were more overall posts and these are more recent), but collectively the range of topics is so much more interesting & broad, you still get some lowest-common-denominator catering, but collectively these posts are so much more inspired than they were just two months ago.
I really would very much enjoy a world where each person participating in Inkhaven continued posting every day even after Inkhaven.
Edit: I would also say that concretely this has changed how I use the website a whole bunch too. In September I think most of the interesting parts of LessWrong discussion was happening inside shortforms, but now I think most of the interesting discussion has moved to posts again, which I consider very healthy.
Of the 16 November posts you cite as evidence of Inkhaven’s positive impact, I count three (Mikhail Samin, mingyuan, Ben Goldhaber) that were actually authored by an Inkhaven resident, and one of those three was a post that received a lot of criticism for its perceived low quality. (Another two were authored by habryka and Ben Pace, and another one was authored by johnswentworth who I think tried to post daily in the spirit of the thing, while not actually participating.) I think this is pretty weak evidence that Inkhaven has made LessWrong much more vibrant.
This is just false. Of the above list, the people who were doing Inkhaven in some form or another:
Me (2nd post on that list)
aggliu
RobertM
Mikhail
Mingyuan
Ben Goldhaber
Ben Pace
John Wentworth
Almost 50% of the whole list!
Me, Ben and Robert were just participating in Inkhaven (Ben for ~3 weeks, me and Robert for a week each) and Wentworth was doing his daily posting because of Inkhaven. It’s obvious there is a huge effect here (you can of course dispute that the posts are good, but trying to somehow slice it up as Inkhaven not having a huge effect seems very unlikely to have any good case for it).
It wasn’t clear to me from the Inkhaven website that you, Ben Pace, and John Wentworth were participating to that degree (though I did mention you three), and I missed aggliu and RobertM. So fair enough, I’ll retract my comment. (ETA: I missed aggliu since I didn’t know their name and they had only that one LW post in November, and I thought RobertM might be Rob Miles, but none of RobertM’s November LW posts seem to be listed among Rob Miles’s posts on the Inkhaven website. But obviously you were there and I was not so I defer to you.)
I noticed that many posters not doing Inkhaven were more vibrant, which I credit to the Inkhaven spirit, which also spawned Halfhaven.